Okapis

Our plastic okapi might be just what you need for your African rainforest diorama. It also makes a sturdy toy for kids. Okapis are beautiful, elegant, and strange. If you were to take a zebra and a giraffe and mash them together you might get an okapi. While it looks more like a zebra, genetically it has a much closer relation to a giraffe. The body shape is like a giraffe though an okapi has a much shorter neck. They stand about six and a half feet tall as measured from the shoulder to the ground and weigh from a little over 400 pounds to as much as 770 pounds. Only ten to twenty thousand are left in the wild, which consists of the Ituri Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). They primarily eat leaves, grasses, fruits, ferns, and fungi among other plant based materials, but are also known to eat the charcoal in trees caused by lightning strikes. Like a lot of other creatures, they are threatened by environmental destruction and poaching and therefore are classified as Endangered.